Albany’s urban renewal agency will try to buy a downtown property. They don’t want the public to know which one, but it sounds like the building and parking lot of the former Wells Fargo branch on First Avenue.

What are the chances of a successful hotel being developed in downtown Albany? Conventional wisdom says zero to none. But maybe the conventional wisdom is wrong. And come winter, business students at the University of Oregon will try to answer the question in a systematic way.

The former St. Francis Hotel in downtown Albany was 101 years old this year. The question now is whether there’s a chance of restoring the vacant upper floors of this four-story landmark — and the adjacent Rhodes block built in 1907 — as apartments or partly as a so-called “boutique hotel.” A team of architects […]